As teachers, we’re always looking for interesting ways to hook children into writing. We don’t always need to transform the classroom into a crime scene or Viking village or spend a fortune to invite special visitors in. We need something engaging at our fingertips on a regular basis. After all, ‘writing’ is on the daily agenda!
Cover all bases
Enter Pobble 365. Whether you’re teaching a grammar or punctuation activity, generating adventurous vocabulary, wanting to deepen children’s thinking through a great discussion or creating a piece of writing. Pobble 365 will support you every day of the year.
It begins with a weird, wonderful, and/or thought-provoking image to inspire you and your pupils. There are 365 images to choose from (hence the title of the resource), leaving no chance for boredom! The images capture everything from alternative viewpoints of fairy tales, interesting setups with superheroes, to animals losing their habitats in rainforests and mythical creatures causing madness and mayhem, as well as many many more! The writing opportunities are endless!
If the image itself doesn’t spark a thousand ideas, simply scroll down to use the ready-made activities provided. Use them as they are or as a starting point for something even bigger.
The activities include questions to prompt discussion and ‘sick’ sentences to improve — a quick, simple and fun way to cover that grammar, punctuation, or spelling objective. There’s also a sentence challenge to take on either as new learning or a bit of revision. To finish, there’s a story starter to inspire children to create either a short or an extended piece of writing.
Real writing
You'll also find examples of real children’s writing linked to many of the images on Pobble. The work has been written by children from all over the world and published on Pobble.com. Speaking from experience, when children are exposed to other children’s writing, it automatically encourages them to see themselves as writers. Using these as examples, children will be inspired and usually want to take some of the ideas for their own writing.
As well as this, it provides opportunities to learn from others' mistakes. We all spend hours providing examples of our own with deliberate mistakes for children to edit and improve, yet having a real example to use is an invaluable tool to support this type of learning. With thousands of pieces of writing on the website, all searchable by age, genre, objective, topic, and book title, it really makes teaching writing easier. As a Pobble subscriber, you also have access to a bank of the best pieces from each year group to use in your lessons to support any aspect of the writing process. Read more about inspiring children's writing with real-life examples from their peers here.
Put simply, Pobble 365 is a must-have in every classroom; I would not want to manage without it. Give it a try!
You can discover 9 other inventive ways to use Pobble 365 in your classroom, recommended by fellow teachers here.